Remember the Bodega

You wake up at 1 p.m. on Saturday with your phone on your chest and the screen still open to her.

You scroll up through it with one eye. The joke she finally sent, which was terrible. Your actual coffee order, which she said was "the order of a man who has given up on joy." The thing about the roof, which neither of you quite said and both of you kept circling, like two people walking around a puddle and pretending not to see it. The last message is from her, timestamped 5:58 a.m.

go to sleep. that's a coffee order too.

Your radiator knocks three times like it's agreeing.

Your apartment in Sunnyside is a fourth-floor walk-up with one window that faces a brick wall and one that faces the 7 train, so you can tell time by the rattle. There's a futon, a desk you never use because you're never home, and a framed photo of your dad outside the carpet store in Allentown in 2009, giving the camera two thumbs up next to a sign that says BIG SALE BIGGER SMILES. You touch the frame on your way to the shower. Habit.

Your mom calls while you're toweling off.

"You sound awake," she says, suspicious.

"I slept."

"Since when do you sleep?" A pause. "Something's different. You sound like somebody told you a joke."

"Somebody did."

"Was it funny?"

You think about joke #42 and the dots that kept starting and stopping. "No," you say. "It was awful."

Your mother is quiet for a moment, and then she says, in a completely different voice, "Oh, Ethan. What's her name?"

You don't go to Qaderi Deli on purpose. You go because you need coffee, and the bodega in Sunnyside is fine, and it's a forty-minute subway ride to Second Avenue on a Saturday, and none of that is why you go.

Bloomberg is asleep on the lottery tickets again. Wasim looks up, sees you, and grins so wide his glasses slide down off his head.

"She's in the back," he says, before you've said anything.

"I'm here for coffee."

"Black like your future. I know." He's already pouring. "She's in the back."

She is. Sitting on a milk crate in Wasim's tiny stockroom between towers of paper towels and canned chickpeas, wearing jeans and an oversized gray sweatshirt and no headwrap at all, her braids loose down her back. She's holding a paper cup with both hands and staring at nothing.

Without the tunic she looks younger and somehow more expensive. You don't know how else to put it. Like the sweatshirt cost three hundred dollars and is trying to hide it.

"Hey," you say.

She jumps, then smiles, and the smile is real but tired around the edges. "You came all the way from Queens for Wasim's coffee?"

"It's very good coffee."

"It's very average coffee." She shifts over on the crate, and you sit on the one beside it. Your knees touch. Neither of you moves them.

"You okay?" you ask.

"Family thing tomorrow." She turns the cup. "I have to be somewhere and be someone. You know?"

"I don't, actually."

She laughs under her breath. "No. You're always just you, Ethan. It's annoying." She bumps your knee with hers. "Tell me something about you nobody at the firm knows."

You think. "I can carpet a whole room in under three hours. My dad taught me. Pad, tack strip, seams. I'm very good."

She stares at you. "That's the most attractive thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Carpet?"

"Competence." She ducks her head and her braids fall forward, hiding the dimple. "Now I've said that, and I'm going to have to live with it."

You want to kiss her so badly your hands ache. You don't. There's a case of coconut water digging into your back, and Wasim is singing along to the radio out front, badly, and it feels like if you kiss her here it'll be real and you won't be able to take it back.

"Tell me something about you," you say instead.

She's quiet a long time.

"I'm a much worse liar than people think," she says finally. "I'm hoping that counts for something."

Before you can ask what she means, her phone buzzes in her sweatshirt pocket. Not the cracked one. A second phone, sleek and black. She looks at the screen and her face closes like a door.

"I have to go," she says. "I'm sorry."

She squeezes your hand once, hard, and leaves through the front. You hear Wasim say something to her in a low voice, and her answer, too quiet to catch.

When you come out, Wasim is wiping the counter and not looking at you.

"Wasim," you say. "What's going on with her?"

He considers you over his glasses for a long moment. Then he hands you a second coffee you didn't order. "Take this for the train, Ethan," he says. "And be kind tomorrow. Whatever happens."

"What happens tomorrow?"

He just pats Bloomberg, who stretches and yawns and goes back to sleep on a ten-dollar scratch-off.

Sunday, 9:04 p.m.

You're on your futon with your laptop, pretending to read a credit memo, when the email arrives. Every phone on the fortieth floor must buzz at once, because thirty seconds later the analyst group chat explodes.

From: Kenrick Shadwell. To: Floor 40 – All. Subject: MANDATORY – Monday 8:00 a.m., Lantern Room.

All Special Situations and trading staff will attend an all-hands at 8:00 a.m. sharp regarding the firm's restructuring. Attendance is not optional. No dial-ins. – KS

Your stomach drops through the futon.

The group chat is a waterfall.

Ebele: is this the cuts? is this THE cuts

Ebele: i literally just signed a lease

Amberley: Relax. If they were firing you they'd do it on a Friday. HR loves a Friday.

Ebele: it's a monday amberley

Amberley: Then it's something worse. Love that for us.

And then Chet, at 9:11:

Chet: RIP to whoever lol. Bring a box just in case

Three people heart it.

You think about the sheet of paper in your desk drawer at the office. Expendable, underlined twice. You think about Kenrick saying one more mistake, and the EBITDA number on page thirty that was never yours.

You text your mother love you, talk tomorrow and she sends back six hearts and are you ok? and you don't answer, because you aren't.

You don't text Chi. She's at her family thing. Being someone.

At 11:58 p.m. your phone lights up anyway.

It's her. Not a joke. No number at the start, no lowercase.

Whatever happens tomorrow, remember the bodega. Please. Remember that was real.

You sit up. You type what are you talking about? and send it.

Delivered.

You wait. The 7 train rattles past your window and the radiator knocks and the screen dims and you tap it awake again.

Chi?

Delivered.

You call. It rings once and goes to a generic voicemail that doesn't even say her name.

You don't sleep. At 6:30 a.m. you're dressed in your one good suit, staring at your phone on the kitchen counter, and the last thing on it is still her message, and your question under it, unanswered.

Remember that was real.

As if something else isn't.